


Unexpected Landing on Jakku

by koalathebear



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Gen, Jakku, Male-Female Friendship, Road Trips, Romantic Friendship, Space Pirates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-10
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 06:13:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8001511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koalathebear/pseuds/koalathebear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey and Poe crash land on Jakku.  Consider this my take on a road trip/buddy movie for these two :)  Just a fun journey across one of my favourite Star Wars planets.</p><p>I started writing this after The Force Awakens but before The Last Jedi came out but never finished it, so have "repurporsed" it and continued writing it as if it was set post-The Last Jedi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Space Pirates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I think it might have been daylightspeaks who gave me a ‘space pirates’ prompt ages ago :)

"Rey! Rey - are you all right?" Poe demanded urgently, staring through the darkness of the flight deck at Rey's pale face where she sat slumped in her seat. She was still strapped in securely as was he. The lights in the cabin were out and he could smell smoke. With an effort, he managed to unbuckle himself and unbuckle the unconscious young woman, pulling her over his shoulder unceremoniously as he staggered through the darkness of the downed Corellian shuttle.

Vision obscured by the blackness and the smoke, it was only after a great deal of effort and swearing that he managed to use the manual override to open the door. Both he and Rey tumbled outside onto the hot sand of the desert and he lay there, gasping for breath.

Once outside, the fresh (albeit hot) air revived Rey and her eyes blinked open suddenly. "Did we lose them?" she demanded, looking around a little wildly as she lay on the sand.

"Yes ..." he nodded. "Well - we blew up their ship, to be precise," he elaborated. "Although we didn't escape entirely unscathed ourselves," he remarked with a grimace, staring at the black smoke spewing out of the shuttle.

Rey noted that all systems were down, which was a blessing in disguise. The crash landing would already have attracted the attention of scavengers from miles around - scavengers who were no doubt headed towards the crash site in search of salvage.

"Jess and Finn are going to be so mad that they missed out on all the action," Rey remarked. It was something of an understatement.

The encounter with the Guavian Death Gang had been unexpected and more than a little unfortunate. They'd flown Jess and Finn to Dandoran where she could make contact with certain "friends" she had in the cartels. The Resistance had always tried to avoid dealing with the smugglers on Dandoran as it could be a dirty business but it was a necessity given their current circumstances. Following the narrow escapes from D'Qar and Crait, the core that remained of the Resistance were desperately attempting to locate and marshal support for the cause across the Galaxy. They needed _everything_. Food, medical supplies, weapons, ships, equipment, people ... Fortunately, they still possessed an abundance of hope.

"Jess and Finn are going to be busy enough trying to keep all of their fingers intact," Poe muttered. "Oh it'll be fine, Jess says. I know how to handle these people Jess says. You don't need to stay with us, Jess says." He shook his head disapprovingly, his exasperation plain in his voice and expression.

"You know Jess ... she's a force of nature," Rey remarked.

"She's something, that's for sure."

"Blame Rose, she said that she desperately needed parts if she was going to repair the ships we have ..."

The Corellian shuttle that they had piloted for the mission had been just a little too convincing and when on its journey back from Dandoran it had crossed the path of the Guavian Death Gang who had assumed incorrectly that the shuttle possible contained smuggled goods and untold treasures. The shuttle had been seized and boarded.

The disappointment of the Death Gang at the lack of smuggled goods had been palpable although they had looked Rey over and declared that she would fetch a pretty price in the market place. Poe they had intended to toss out the airlock.

Escaping had been no easy feat. The Death Gang's red-armoured foot soldiers were famous for their ruthlessness and their deadliness. Recruited after swearing loyalty to the gang in exchange for a cybernetic augmentation, they were equipped with a mechanical reservoir that acted as a second heart, injecting a secret combination of chemicals into the soldiers' bloodstream, giving them a boost of speed and aggression. If that wasn't bad enough, the soldiers were armed with with the latest black market technology… including the Tostovin Munitions percussive cannon.

Fortunately, cybernetic augmentation was no match for natural smarts - and the Force. There was a very good reason that General Organa was always pairing up Rey and Poe on missions like this - they had proven themselves a formidable unit on numerous occasions. This situation had proved a little more challenging than the norm but they had, nonetheless, managed to talk enough to distract the Gang - before locking half a dozen of the soldiers in one room, killing another three, disabling the tractor beam retrieving their shuttle and fleeing ... with the remainder of the Death Gang in hot pursuit.

When it became clear that escape was not an option, an outright fire fight had commenced in the skies above Jakku.

"Get to the escape pod now, Rey. Once you land on Jakku, lay low and find a way to contact the Resistance - they will come for you," he ordered her, he had sat at the controls of their shuttle.

She had ignored him and strapped herself in beside him calmly as if he hadn't said a word.

"Are you disobeying a direct order?" he demanded, not sure if he was outraged, amused or both at her unrepentant defiance.

"I'm not one of the pilots in your squadron, Poe," she had retorted. "If you're expecting me to bail out when we're in the middle of a fight and you're in danger, then you've got another thing coming."

He gritted his teeth. "I have to keep you safe. You know you're far more valuable to the Resistance than I am."

"Says who?" she demanded stubbornly.

"You know it's true," he told her. She was a gifted Jedi in training, indispensable to the General's plans to defeat the First Order. Poe was little more than a trusted foot soldier who had little more use than to fight and help rebuild the fragments of the Resistance. "You know that if it comes down to it, I'll die so that you can live," he had told her.

Rey had shrugged. "If it's all the same to you, I'd like it better if we both live - so I'm staying."

Poe had exhaled. He'd learned a very long time ago that Rey was stubborn beyond measure and short of picking her up and stuffing her in the escape pod by force, he'd have to live with her choice.

"So are you flying or me?" Poe had asked in resignation.

"I'd better fly," she had suggested. "You're a better shot," she had pointed out.

"I know, I know - and you're a better pilot," he had muttered, rolling his eyes in baleful resignation.

Rey had flown the shuttle close to the Death Gang's ship - so close that Poe imagined that he could almost hear their sounds of choked horror as the shuttle flew past. From there, he'd done his worst and unloaded the entire onboard arsenal at the ship's engine before Rey had high-tailed it out of there with a merry flourish.

Of course the Death Gang hadn't gone down without a fight and before the ship had erupted into a massive ball of fire, its cannons had managed one final shot that had clipped the smaller Corellian shuttle despite Rey's deft flying.

"We've been hit," Rey had muttered, a note of panic in her voice as she struggled to steady the shuttle which was beginning to spin out of control.

"Give me the controls," he had ordered her and Rey had relinquished them without protest, biting her lip and watching as Poe had fought long and hard with the controls of their plummeting shuttle. She was better at flying. He was better at crashing. It was a dubious honour but he'd take it.

Poe had managed to stop the spinning and slowed down their descent slightly as they fell from the sky. Smoke and sparks filled the flight deck and it felt as though every single alert light on the panel in front of them was lit up and screaming as they spun and plummeted through the atmosphere and towards the planet's unwelcoming surface.

"Turn off all the lights," she had managed to bite out as they spun. "You need to go dark ... or you'll attract every single nearby scavenger to our crash site..."

"Good thinking," he had retorted and they had gone dark as they continued to fall.

"We're going to be ok, Rey," he had promised her grimly, even as the shuttle had fought violently against his control.

"I trust you," she had told him - seconds before blacking out ...

"That was ... some pretty impressive flying there," Rey marvelled as she fell back bonelessly onto the hot sand and looked around, realising that they were not only still alive but largely uninjured except for some bruises and scratches. She raised a hand to her forehead, wincing slightly.

"Not my first crash landing on Jakku," Poe explained with a wry and self-deprecating shrug. "Let me have a look at that," he told her, leaning towards her to examine her head.

"I'm fine," she replied. "It's just a little bump ..."

"You're bleeding ... I'll get the medkit from onboard in a moment." With an effort, he struggled to his feet and extended a hand down towards Rey, helping her up.

They did a walk around of the shuttle, Poe checking the exterior and Rey examining the interior.

"No way we are taking off any time soon," Poe told her grimly at the same time she said,"We're going to have to do some major repairs before we can go anywhere."

"I guess the comms are shot?" he asked her as they sat back in the sand in the shade of the shuttle so that he could tend to the cut on her forehead. Rey nodded ruefully, wincing a little as Poe cleaned the cut.

"Completely fried ...I guess it's lucky that we're sitting near the largest junkyard in the Galaxy. Although we're over a day's walk from the Graveyard..."

"Do you think we can do it?" he asked her.

She nodded. "Do you trust me?"

"With my life."


	2. The Pilgrim's Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Poe meet Old Meru and Poe learns about a number of Jakku dangers...

They walked almost half a day without encountering anyone in the desert except the occasional anti-social scavenger on foot who scarcely acknowledged their existence except to stare at them suspiciously and then veer out of their path sharply.

Jakku was similar to many of the frontier colonies, populated with folk who preferred to remain unidentified and completely unnoticed. Some were running from something - the law, or a troubled past, or their own failure to become what they wanted to be. They had ended up on Jakku because it was about as far as you could go in the galaxy without coming to the end of the stars. It wasn't a place that Poe had ever particularly felt the need to visit yet here he was for his second visit.

"And you grew up here - all alone," Poe marvelled as they stopped in the shelter of a large rocky outcrop to rest and drink water.

"Is that so hard to believe?" Rey asked, pouring the water into her mouth before handing it to Poe who also took a long swallow. Standing in the hot baking sun and feeling the sand beneath her feet, it felt like she'd never left Jakku, that cool green planets with water and lush vegetation had been the stuff of dreams ... The perspiration dried on her skin almost as soon as it formed and the heat was an almost visible glow on the ground around them.

"Not at all ... you look like a creature of the desert," he remarked with a smile, gesturing to her practical desert clothing that she had continued to wear despite having been away from Jakku for some time now. It had been her own way of maintaining her individuality and a connection to her past.

A large bird-like creature flew past them and Poe looked up curiously into the blue cloudless sky as it shot them an interested and decidedly unfriendly look. Rey raised her staff in the air to shoo it away.

"Steelpecker," she told him with a grimace. They were nasty birds with razor-sharp beaks and iron-hard talons who liked to rest inside the wreckage of the Graveyard, hunting for rare alloys and metals.

"Be very, very careful of them," she warned him. "I once I saw a scavenger named Teng Malar accidentally break open a hatch below a steelpecker colony. They came from every direction and there was nothing that could be done - within ten minutes they'd ripped Teng to shreds." It had been gruesome to watch but even worse to hear the agonised screams of the scavenger.

"Lovely," he remarked, putting the canteen bag in his heavy backpack that contained water, food and also other supplies that Rey had told him when they set out were essential for their survival.

"What's the powdered barium for?" he had asked her.

"Well ... if you're hurt in the desert and the Ripper Raptors don't get you the gnaw jaws will."

The bugs, a third of a metre long with chitinous plates, too many legs and big scissor like mandibles lived in warrens of tunnels beneath the sand coming out at night. They generally avoided people but would take advantage of someone who was weak or asleep.

"If we have to camp in the desert, then a circle of powdered barium will keep them away," Rey explained.

"Maybe we should bring a few canisters then," Poe had suggested with a grin.

"Good idea," she had agreed.

"So do I want to know what ripper raptors are?" he had asked as they had filled their satchels with provisions and equipment. 

Reptilian creatures with leathery wings and keen eyesight, the raptors spent their days riding the thermals looking for carrion. "If you ever see ripper raptors circling a spot on Jakku you know someone or something is in trouble," she had told him.

"Lucky our blasters work just fine," he had told her with a crooked grin.

"And we should bring plenty of water ... we can refill our canteens at Old Meru's but we can never be too careful."

The biggest danger in the desert though was the heat. Dehydrated, the body's temperature climbed and it wasn't possible to think straight. When something went wrong this meant making a bad decision which on Jakku usually led to death. Rey knew of a long list of scavengers who had messed up and died of heat – scavengers who should have known better. Scavengers who _had_ known better, but over-confidence coupled with greed had been their downfall. The desert was merciless and a person had to know when it was time to get out of the blazing heat and into shade.

"I can carry that," Rey had pointed out when Poe had adjusted the load of their packs so that he carried the heavier items.

"I know you can. But I need you nimble and agile - ready to defend me in case we get attacked by those gnaw jaws and ripper raptors," he had joked.

"What about the Steelpeckers?" she asked.

"Those, too."

They hiked through the better part of the morning, stopping only now and then for a brief rest or to share a rations pack or drink some water. Neither voiced any complaints about the dry heat of the air or the discomfort of walking through the yielding and ever shifting sand of the tall dunes. Both were too busy scanning the horizon for possible hazards and threats. The thick, hot sand made it difficult to walk fast. In some parts, they slid and stumbled although Rey, having grown up on Jakku, was slightly lighter on her feet than Poe.

Walking along the Pilgrim's Road, they finally arrived at Old Meru's, a tent with a few table, chairs and a coolth reservoir that had gone dry long before Rey was born. While the cool air had long gone, there was still shade and water available for parched and exhausted travellers. The place was deserted when they arrived, though and Poe nodded politely in the direction of Old Meru who was made mostly of cybernetic parts, clothed in a motley assortment of sand and beige-coloured cloaks and rags. 

"Don't mess with her," Rey warned Poe in an undertone as they approached the tent. "The last time someone made that mistake she came out of her shack with the biggest gun I'd ever seen. When they cut her up she lost her ability to make any kind of conversation."

"Who's they?"

"Don't know. Didn't ask. You shouldn't either."

"Got it. No small talk," Poe acknowledged, his tanned skin flushed from the heat and his dark curls damp with perspiration.

"I'm being completely serious, Poe. You like to be chatty. Don't be chatty with Old Meru."

"Got it. No small talk. Don't be chatty."

"And don't look at her arm either - she hates that."

"OK, don't mess with Old Meru, no small talk, don't be chatty and don't look at her arm. Got it," Poe recited back dutifully, a droll expression on his tanned and sweaty face.

"I'm serious!" she exclaimed sternly, glaring at him. She knew from experience that Poe could be flippant at the very worst of times. It had landed the pair of them in hot water on more than one occasion when the recipient had not been as appreciate of his wit as the pilot might have liked.

Old Meru emerged from her tent with tins of water in exchange for rations. Rey and Poe drank the water and then opened up a rations portion which they shared between them. The shade and the fresh water was a welcome respite from the unrelenting blaze of Jakku's sun and Rey held the tin of water to cool her flushed cheeks, ignoring the trickle of perspiration sliding down her back.

"What?" she demanded when she noticed that Poe was watching her with a smile on his face. The flight suit he was wearing, while not strictly designed for a desert environment did help his body retain moisture although he was as sweaty as she was.

"You look ..." he struggled to find the right word. "...cute," he told her unexpectedly, gesturing at her flushed face, tangled hair and freckled nose.

At her snort of patent disbelief, he turned to the silent figure that hovered to the side. "Is it all right if we fill up our canteens here?" Poe asked Old Meru politely and she nodded, gesturing at a nearby tank with her one remaining flesh and blood arm. A wizened, brown and leathery arm that Poe couldn't help noticing was covered with a myriad of extremely fascinating-looking military tattoos. He inclined his head curiously to take a closer look.

Rey gave him a nudge to stop him staring and he quickly recollected himself and walked over to the tank to fill up their water canteens.

Then they were on their way again, walking along the Pilgrim's Road until it vanished into empty desert again. "I _told_ you not to look at her arm."

"I couldn't _not_ look ... what was she? A mercenary?"

"No one knows ... and you just don't ask that sort of thing on Jakku if you want to stay alive. We need to walk faster - I want to get to higher ground before nightfall."

"Do I want to know why?" Poe asked wryly. "Are you going to tell me about some sort of creepy crawly of the night that will eat my brain if we don't get out of the sand dunes before darkness falls?"

"Night Watchers," she told him succinctly.

"I knew it!" he declared, quickening his pace as they walked in the direction of a large outcrop of rocks. "Tell me more about them," he invited her. "They sound even more fun than the steelpeckers."

"Some folks call them sand borers or Arconan night terrors. They mostly stick to the sinking fields but I've heard tell that they can migrate into the Gozone when big storms push sand dunes that way."

"How big? There don't seem to be any small creatures here on Jakku ..."

Rey grinned at him. "They're massive worms. Two metres long when fully grown ... some of them grow to be five of six times that size."

"My blaster is my friend," he declared solemnly.

"If you can get to it in time!" she told him. "Night Watchers hunt by sensing vibrations above them - they erupt out of the sinking fields with jaws open to eat whatever they find. They're not picky because there's nothing a night watcher can't eat. Their mouth can grind metal into scrap and their stomachs generate acid to melt down anything they can't digest. They could even eat a hotshot Resistance pilot."

"Hopefully I'd at least cause a bit of indigestion before I die. No reason why I should be the only one to suffer," Poe mused contemplatively.

Rey paused and squinted at the horizon. Wordlessly, Poe handed her his quadnocs before she could ask for them. Aiming them at the horizon, she let the integrated automatic tracker focus. Lowering it, she spoke without turning, her gaze still fixed on the horizon.

"We need to move faster."

"What is it now? We're being attacked by a herd of giant killer acid-spraying moths?" he asked drolly.

"Not quite. Sandstorm. So we need to move – now."

"Got it," he answered, his expression serious for once and the two of them began the very difficult task of jogging through the sand.

"So I'm guessing the sandstorms here are pretty bad?"

"Extremely bad. Better save your energy for jogging,," she told him breathlessly, although she softened her words with a smile.

"You're the boss," he said with a grin and they picked up the pace, not turning around to stare at the dark cloud of sand that was approaching them rapidly from behind.


End file.
